I Designed Facebook, So If Someone’s Going To Get Fired For This It Should Be Me: Zuckerberg To Recode

Well the evidence that we’ve seen is quite clear, that the Russians did try to interfere with the election.

Yes. All of what we saw is on Facebook. Then we’ve tried to cooperate with the government and the different investigations that are going on. They obviously have much more context than this. But what we saw, before the election, was this Russian hacking group, part of Russian military intelligence, that I guess our government calls APT28. They were trying to do more traditional methods of hacking: Phishing people’s accounts, just getting access to people’s accounts that way.

The information that we have on who these groups are largely comes from the U.S. government and U.S intelligence.

We have no reason not to. Certainly, we’ve seen the activity from APT28. That name comes from U.S. intelligence. Advanced Persistent Threat 28 from Russia, and the IRA. These are real things. We went out, we traced IRA activity, not only through what they’ve tried to do in the U.S., but we’ve traced that activity back to trying to manipulate culture and news in Russia itself, including taking down there, pages that are connected to sanctioned Russian news organizations that the government, Russcom, has said are real news organizations there, but what we’ve detected through our systems are actually essentially the same thing as the IRA. All the people who are running them are the same.

I’m not sure. I think… In retrospect, I do think it’s fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring. I think now we understand that, given where we are, both the centrality of Facebook, but also, frankly, we’re a profitable enough company to have 20,000 people go work on reviewing content, so I think that means that we have a responsibility to go do that. That’s a different position than we were in five or six years ago, or even when we went public and were a meaningfully smaller company at that point.

I do think it’s fair to say that we were probably… we were too focused on just the positives and not focused enough on some of the negatives. That said, I don’t wanna leave the impression that we didn’t care about security or didn’t have thousands of people working on it before then.

There are really two core principles at play here. There’s giving people a voice, so that people can express their opinions. Then, there’s keeping the community safe, which is really important. We’re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things. Within this, those principles have real trade-offs and real tug on each other. In this case, we feel like our responsibility is to prevent hoaxes from going viral and being widely distributed.

Look, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

Yeah, so the principles at play here are, on the one hand, you want people to have control over their information and be able to bring it out of Facebook to other different apps, because we’re not gonna build all of the social experiences and it should be easy for people to use their data anywhere.

But on the other hand, if they have that information in Facebook and the developer has some relationship with us, then we also have a responsibility to protect people and keep people safe. And what happened here was a developer built a quiz app, and then they turned around and sold the data that people gave them to someone else. And that is clearly against all of the policies that we have. I mean, that’s terrible, right? We don’t sell data, we don’t allow anyone to sell data. Because it was on their servers, we don’t necessarily see that transaction or whatever they’re doing.

So we do a number of things. One is, we do ongoing audits and we have built technical systems to see if a developer is requesting information in weird ways. We do spot checks where we can audit developers’ servers. But a lot of the stuff comes from flags that either people in the community or law enforcement or different folks send us, and that was actually similar here too. I think it was The Guardian who initially pointed out to us, “Hey, we think that this developer, Alexander Kogan, has sold information.” And when we learned about that, we immediately shut down the app, took away his profile, and demanded certification that the data was deleted.

Now the thing that I think, in retrospect, that we really messed up here is that we believed the certification. Now normally, I don’t know about you, but when someone writes a legal certification, my inclination is to believe that. But in retrospect, I think it’s very clear ...

All right, that’s fair. I tend to have more faith in the rule of law, but...

Well, I think it’s a big issue. But look, I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to get fired for this, it should be me. And I think that the important thing going forward is to make sure that we get this right. In this case, the most important steps, in terms of, to prevent this from happening again, we’d already taken in 2014 when we had changed dramatically the way that the platform worked.

But overall, I mean, this is an important situation, and I think again it’s ... This to me is an example of, you get judged by how you deal with an issue when it comes up. And I think on this one, we’ve done the right things, and many of them I think we’d actually done years ago to prevent this kind of situation from happening again.

Not on this podcast right now.
(banter)
Do you really want me to fire myself right now?

Just for the news?

You know, I think that there’s ... It’s a very interesting debate overall. If you actually get down to why we’re big, it’s not ... In the traditional sense, we’re not big because we’re so big in the United States, although we are and a lot of people use our products here. If we weren’t an international company, if you said, “Okay, you have to shut down all of your services outside of the U.S.,” we actually would not be very profitable at all; we actually would probably be unprofitable.

So the reason why we are a successful and large company is because we have built something here that can now serve billions of people around the world as well, which is actually where all the margin comes from, in terms of ... I mean, we have the cost structure that we have, and then that’s where the business comes from and ... Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of revenue in the United States as well, but that would barely cover the cost of the company.

So I think you have this question from a policy perspective, which is, do we want American companies to be exporting across the world? We grew up here, I think we share a lot of values that I think people hold very dear here, and I think it’s generally very good that we’re doing this, both for security reasons and from a values perspective. Because I think that the alternative, frankly, is going to be the Chinese companies. If we adopt a stance which is that, “Okay, we’re gonna, as a country, decide that we wanna clip the wings of these companies and make it so that it’s harder for them to operate in different places, where they have to be smaller, then there are plenty of other companies out that are willing and able to take the place of the work that we’re doing.”

Longer term, as a technologist, one of things that just excites me is there are always new computing platforms. Every 10 or 15 years a new one comes along. They’re always more native, they capture your human experience more. Immersively, you share more naturally what you’re experiencing. I just think that VR and AR are going to be a really big deal.

You can just see this trajectory from early internet, when the technology and connections were slow, most of the internet was text. Text is great, but it can be sometimes hard to capture what’s going on. Then, we all got phones with cameras on them and the internet got good enough to be primarily images. Now the networks are getting good enough that it’s primarily video. At each step along the way, we’re able to capture the human experience with greater fidelity and richness, and I think that that’s great.

Now, I do think that we’re gonna move towards this world where eventually you’ll be able to capture a whole experience that you’re in and be able to send that to someone. I think that that’s just gonna be an amazing technology for perspective taking and putting yourself in other people’s shoes, for being able to feeling like you’re really physically there with someone even when you’re not. One of the criticisms of technology today is you’re sitting and looking at your phone, and we could be sitting together but we’re actually fragmented.